ose adventures so many of us have breathlessly followed, has been
succeeded by actual "Hollands" and practical "Argonauts" designed by
American inventors and manned by American crews.

LONG-DISTANCE TELEPHONY

What Happens When You Talk into a Telephone Receiver

In Omaha, Nebraska, half-way across the continent and about forty hours
from Boston by fast train, a man sits comfortably in his office chair
and, with no more exertion than is required to lift a portable receiver
off his desk, talks every day to his representative in the chief New
England city. The man in Boston hears his chief's voice and can
recognise the peculiarities in it just as if he stood in the same room
with him. The man in Nebraska, speaking in an ordinary conversational
tone, can be heard perfectly well in Boston, 1,400 miles away.

This is the longest talk on record--that is, it is the longest
continuous telephone line in steady and constant use, though the human
voice has been carried even greater distances with the aid of this
wonderful instrument.

The telephone is so common that no one stops to consider the wonder of
it, and not one person in a hundred can tell how it works.

At this time, when the telephone is as necessary as pen and ink, it is
hard to realise a time when men could not speak to one another from a
distance, yet a little more than a quarter of a century ago the genius
who invented it first conceived the great idea.

Sometimes an inventor is a prophet: he sees in advance how his idea,
perfected and in universal use, will change things, establish new
manners and customs, new laws and new methods. Alexander Graham Bell was
one of these prophetic inventors--the telephone was his invention, not
his discovery. He first got the idea and then sought a way to make it
practical. If you put yourself in his place, forget what has been
accomplished, and put out of mind how the voice is transmitted from
place to place by the slender wire, it would be impossible even then to
realise how much in the dark Professor Bell was in 1874.

The human speaking voice is full of changes; unlike the notes from a
musical instrument, there is no uniformity in it; the rise and fall of
inflection, the varying sound of the vowels and consonants, the
combinations of words and syllables--each produces a different
vibration and different tone. To devise an instrument that would
receive all these varying tones and inflections and change them into